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ANGELA DAVIS: STANDING WITH PALESTINIANS  
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Angela Y. Davis
March 19, 2024
Hammer & Hope
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_ Reflecting on the past 60 years. "This is the first time in my own
political memory that the Palestine solidarity movement is
experiencing such broad support both throughout the U.S. and all over
the world." _

Angela Davis in Paris, France, March 2013. Photograph by Richard
Dumas/Agence VU/Redux. // Hammer & Hope,

 

Solidarity with Palestinians and their decades-long struggle in
defense of their land, culture, and freedom has long been a central
theme of my political life. I am gratified to see so many young people
— especially young Black people — supporting the struggle in
Palestine today. The emotional turbulence so many of us have
experienced for the past five months as we’ve witnessed the
unprecedented damage the Israeli military has inflicted reminds me
just how central the Palestinian quest for justice is to liberation
struggles here in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, as well as
to my own sense of self in our extremely complicated political world.

The state of Israel is the purveyor not only of a settler-colonial
project but also of one that actively continues its violent expansion
in the 21st century. Over the past months we have witnessed
widespread, unnecessary death and extraordinary devastation that has
led to the uprooting of practically the entire population of Gaza.
Massive demonstrations all over the planet and deep collective grief
about the conditions in Gaza have turned my attention back to the
emotion-laden political mobilizations during the summer of 2020.
People everywhere, including in Palestine, felt both rage and profound
sadness at the racist police lynching of George Floyd. Some might say
that the issues driving the George Floyd mobilizations and the current
protests against the war on Gaza are different. But are they?

The collective mourning elicited by the racist violence that claimed
the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others
galvanized demonstrations aimed at the systems, structures, and
histories that enabled such racist state violence. And those
demonstrations were implicitly directed at the global imperialism that
furthers the proliferation of racial capitalist strategies. Some of
the protests also highlighted the lessons the U.S. has learned as a
direct result of its close alliance with Israel, which has included
trainings offered by the Israel Defense Forces to U.S. police
departments all over the country. Whether or not the Minnesota police
ever directly learned combat moves from the IDF, the increased
militarization of policing here is directly related to global
capitalism, including the economic and military ties between Israel
and the U.S.

Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza —
who, along with those in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and inside
Israel itself, have been conscripted to serve as involuntary
embodiments of the foundational enemy of Israel — has produced
unimaginable grief and sorrow. Gazan families will never fully recover
from the deaths of their loved ones, from the destruction of their
homes (as many as 70 percent of homes and more than half of all
buildings have been damaged or destroyed), from their monthslong
attempts to survive without food and water, or from sleeping in the
open as human counterparts of the scarred landscape, which may not
recover in the foreseeable future. The vicious and dehumanizing verbal
assaults by representatives of the government and armed forces have
compounded this trauma. In announcing a “complete siege” of Gaza,
the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced: “There will
be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.” He
justified this action by adding, “We are fighting human animals and
we are acting accordingly.” The international press widely quoted
these remarks in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 assault by Hamas.

These atrocities, according to the charges South Africa brought before
the International Court of Justice, have acquired genocidal
proportions. But amid all of this, we have witnessed the rise of an
unprecedented degree of global resistance and solidarity with Gazans
and Palestinians. Like many others during these heartbreaking times, I
have been encouraged by the leadership proffered by Jewish Voice for
Peace, IfNotNow, and other progressive Jewish organizations. Their
dramatic presence in the movement is a reminder that binary
constructions obscure more accurate and nuanced understandings of what
it means to engage in freedom quests.

I was fortunate to witness Jewish solidarity with Palestine, however
minoritized, during the early history of the state of Israel, which
coincided with my undergraduate years at Brandeis University. My own
lifelong sense of solidarity with Palestine is rooted in those
experiences of my young political life. I learned the moral value of
political solidarity and what it means to express that solidarity not
only as a minority position within a larger progressive community but
also through a deep identification with those who have been designated
as enemies. Solidarity is never entirely straightforward, but in this
situation, it requires us to reach beyond simplistic explanations that
attribute positions of moral rectitude to one side and utter depravity
to the other. Solidarity commands us to recognize the fallacious
either/or construction that effectively forbids the proximity of
positions of solidarity for Palestine and of deep and heartfelt
condemnations of antisemitism.

In the process of reflecting on the meaning of solidarity, I have also
learned over the years how dangerous it is to objectify one’s
perceived enemies such that nothing they do or say can ever change or
even challenge the qualities they are assumed to embody. It is always
easy to defer to prevailing discourses that rely on these
objectifications, and I think that most of us (myself included) have
given in to such pressures at times. Colonialism, racism, and
patriarchy all thrive on such capitulations.

But some of us have had the good fortune to have been presented with
alternative ways of understanding, critical engagements that question
the ideological underpinnings of what we are confronting. I am
thankful to many people in the various collective movements and
organizations to which I have belonged — the Communist Party USA,
L.A. SNCC, Black Panther Political Party, Black Panther Party,
Socialist German Students’ Union, Black Women’s Health Project,
and others too numerous to name — for having pointed me and others
in more productive directions, regardless of the consequences for
their own lives. I have always gravitated toward those who are
prepared to challenge the status quo. And I am grateful to those who
have offered support when I have come under attack personally.

In 2018, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute offered me a human
rights award named after Fred Shuttlesworth, a co-founder of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then rescinded the honor
because of my activism in support of Palestine. Before I even had the
opportunity to decide what my response would be, Jewish Voice for
Peace and other progressive Jewish organizations began to organize.

Their support was especially important, because it was clear that I
was not being targeted as an individual. Several months after the
rescission of the award, Representative Ilhan Omar was singled out by
Donald Trump, who misrepresented her as he argued that she was
insufficiently critical of the perpetrators of 9/11 and accused her of
antisemitism because of her principled support of Palestine. Scholar
and activist Barbara Ransby and others organized an outdoor
convergence and protest in Washington, D.C., to support Omar,
alongside her fellow representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley,
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In November 2018, CNN fired academic and
activist Marc Lamont Hill because he had used the phrase “from the
river to the sea” at a UN meeting on the International Day of
Solidarity with the Palestinian People. His firing prefigured
Zionists’ widespread contemporary effort to ban a rallying call that
for many, in the words of Tlaib, is “an aspirational call for
freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death,
destruction, or hate.”

 
Palestinian solidarity protesters in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of
Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 21, 2023. Photograph by Christopher Lee for
Hammer & Hope.
It was clear then that the Zionist lobby was stepping up its offensive
because it had been losing ground. During and after the 2014 Ferguson
protests, young Black activists and their supporters had begun to
fiercely challenge the ideological representation of Israel as the
central outpost of democracy in the Middle East, which had to be
defended at all costs. The longstanding work of Palestinian activists
Linda Sarsour, Ahmad Abuzaid and others to develop productive
alliances that could amplify Black solidarity with Palestine and
further cultivate internationalism within the Black Lives Matter
movement began to resonate broadly. The Dream Defenders, founded in
Florida by Phillip Agnew, Ahmad Abuznaid, and Gabriel Pendas in the
aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder, not only brought Palestinian
Americans and African Americans together in an organization that
identifies as abolitionist, feminist, and socialist but also has
organized a number of delegations to Palestine. I see a direct line
connecting this recent history — and, of course, all the history
linking Black and Palestinian movements since the Nakba in 1948 —
with the rising numbers of Black people who now refuse to toe the
Democratic Party line on support for Israel.

As radical advocates and activists, we don’t often have the
opportunity to experience the changes for which we struggle; instead
we expect that our work will affirm new starting points for
generations to come. But sometimes, if we manage to live long enough,
we may also have the good fortune of experiencing the transformative
impact of struggles in which we have participated. When I first heard
the news that the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award was being
rescinded as a response to my Palestine activism, I felt unable to
breathe — as if this blow had literally knocked the wind out of my
body — which was why my statement at the time indicated that I was
“stunned.” That feeling soon dissipated, however, as many
expressions of solidarity from all over the world, including from
organizations of rabbis and other Jewish formations, began to
circulate. Overwhelmingly supportive responses from Black and other
politically progressive organizations reminded me that freedom work,
even when it may not appear to be making an appreciable difference,
can lead to profound and transformative results.

Though the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s gala had been
canceled, community activists, together with the mayor and other city
officials, came together to organize a public event at the Boutwell
Auditorium that probably attracted 10 times more people than the
fund-raiser would have. For me personally and politically, this event
occasioned a rare and deep-seated sense of collective triumph. In this
historical bastion of racist segregation where I had been born and
grew up — the Johannesburg of the South — a vast collection of
people of different racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds
attested to the weakening influence of Zionist ideology. When I looked
out into the audience from the stage, I saw so many of my childhood
friends, a number of whom had helped organize this gathering,
protesting the BCRI decision, and all of whom were putting their
bodies on the line by showing up en masse.

Before visiting Birmingham, I had traveled to Waltham, Mass., to
participate in the 50th anniversary celebration of the Department of
African and African American Studies at Brandeis. Students at Brandeis
during the early 1960s were constantly reminded that Israel was
founded in 1948, the same year Brandeis was established. While none of
us could avoid the pervasive Zionism, I was grateful to have a Jewish
roommate during my first year who constantly steered me to think
critically about the representation of Israel as the only possible
defense for the global Jewish community. She turned my attention to
the condition of Palestinians, who were being systematically divested
of their land, their rights, and their future. She also helped me to
understand that standing with the Palestinian resistance was the best
way to fight for a world where we could all be safe.

I invoke my own experience at Brandeis because despite its
perpetuation of the claim that Palestinians embody a continuing
existential threat to Israel (it was the first private university to
ban a Students for Justice in Palestine campus chapter), I do not
remember any major conflicts around this issue during my time there.
But I do recall many subterranean conversations about the impact of
this militaristic nation-building process on the Palestinian people.
What I now deeply appreciate is that I retained crucial insights
regarding the kinship between racism and antisemitism (violent white
supremacists dynamited Black churches and homes in my natal city of
Birmingham and targeted a synagogue), and these insights continued to
lead me to the people I organized with and the people with whom I
socialized. They were not displaced by my evolving consciousness of
the dangers of Zionism.

After I graduated from Brandeis in 1965, I traveled to Frankfurt,
Germany, to study with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and others
associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of
Frankfurt. Shortly after arriving, I became involved with the
Socialist German Students’ Union (SDS). This was precisely when SDS
began to turn away from Israel and toward solidarity with the Arab
states challenging Israel. A few days before the outbreak of the 1967
war, the police killed a student named Benno Ohnesorg while he
attended an SDS protest against the shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin.
Fascist police violence happened at the same time as the Israeli
army’s aggression. This led the SDS to create an interesting
connection between supporting Third World Liberation efforts
(including solidarity with Palestine) and challenging police violence
and other forms of state repression within what was then West Germany.
That a student could be killed for participating in peaceful protests
provided clear evidence that West Germany had not overcome the dangers
of fascism.

 
Angela Davis speaks at a Free Huey rally in DeFremery Park in
Oakland, Calif., Nov. 12, 1969. Standing next to Davis is James
Burford.  (Photograph by Stephen Shames.  //  Hammer & Hope)
After I returned to the U.S. in the fall of 1967, I was determined to
find my way into the revolutionary Black Liberation Movement, and I
reconnected with Herbert Marcuse, my Brandeis mentor, who was now
teaching at UC San Diego. My experiences in Germany — especially
among students from Africa and other parts of what was then known as
the Third World — had consolidated my embrace of revolutionary
internationalism, and I gravitated toward organizations and
individuals who shared that identification. At a time of growing
global solidarity with Third World struggles, all of the groups I
worked with — the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the
Los Angeles chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) — were absolutely clear about their solidarity with
Palestine. During that period, I participated in a series of exciting
and enlightening political conversations with James Forman, who was
then the international affairs director of SNCC. At that time, SNCC
encouraged its members to study the situation in the Middle East; the
organization insisted that making significant progress in our domestic
struggles required us to embrace internationalism. In a letter Forman
wrote to the executive secretary of SNCC during the 1967 war, he
explained:

_The class struggle in the black community will become sharper if the
war continues. Obviously the “gut” reaction in many people is
against Israel and for the Arabs, reflecting the black-white tension,
the hardening of racism, and the particular circumstances in which we
find ourselves in this country. However, it becomes very necessary for
those of us in the organization, especially those of us in leadership
positions, to study the historical development and the contemporary
economic policies of Israel. Actually Israel represents an extension
of United State foreign policy as well as an attempt by the Zionists
to create a homeland for the Jews. The latter merges with the former
in many countries, especially the United States, Great Britain, and
France in some respects._

When the FBI arrested me in October 1970, I could not have predicted
that my own political proximity to Palestine would increase
exponentially. Of the many expressions of solidarity forwarded to me
during my imprisonment, I was most deeply moved by the messages
emanating from prisons. I can still remember how humbled I felt upon
receiving a beautiful letter of solidarity signed by Palestinian
political prisoners. The letter had been smuggled out of an Israeli
jail and transmitted to my lawyers, who brought it into the California
jail where I was being held. Some 40 years later, when I joined a
solidarity delegation to Palestine of women of color and indigenous
scholar-activists, I met a Palestinian activist who told me that he
was one of the imprisoned people who had signed that solidarity
message so many years ago. When we embraced, I experienced a profound
sense of satisfaction with the trajectory of my life and how it has
intersected with so many others around the world who again and again
collectively generate the hope that radical transformation is being
inscribed on the agendas of our futures.

Today the unceasing military assaults on Gaza are reason for deep
despair, especially as we learn every day about a loss of life and
community destruction that is unprecedented in comparison to all
recent wars. Despite the obvious need for a cease-fire — a permanent
cease-fire — the U.S. government continues to lend aid and support
to Israel. Young activists today are trying to unravel this conundrum,
even as the government and both major political parties remain in
thrall to Zionism. Despite efforts to persuade the public that any
critique or even questioning of the state of Israel_ _is equivalent
to antisemitism, astute young people, including radical Jewish
activists, are pointing out that the most effective struggles against
antisemitism are necessarily linked to opposition to racism,
Islamophobia, and other modes of repression and discrimination. This
is the first time in my own political memory that the Palestine
solidarity movement is experiencing such broad support both throughout
the U.S. and all over the world. Here in the United States, despite
the McCarthyist strategies employed against those who call for freedom
and justice for Palestine on campuses, in the entertainment industry,
and elsewhere, we are in a new political moment, and we cannot — we
must not — capitulate to those who represent the interests of racial
capitalism and the legacies of colonialism. As June Jordan wrote in
“Poem for South African Women”:

    And who will join this standing up
    and the ones who stood without sweet company
    will sing and sing
    back into the mountains and
    if necessary
    even under the sea

    _we are the ones we have been waiting for_

_[ANGELA Y. DAVIS is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and
Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer,
her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related
intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many
books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant
Struggle.]_

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* Angela Davis
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* Palestine
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* Palestine solidarity
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* freedom struggle
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* African Americans
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* Black solidarity with Palestine
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* Ilhan Omar
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* Linda Sarsour
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* Germany
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* Gaza
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* Israel
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* zionism
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* Anti-Zionism
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* Jewish community
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* Zionist lobby
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* civil rights movement
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